Pilot Redux
by SSJL
Summary: We all know they wanted each other since the very beginning. So let's imagine that they didn't fight quite so hard...


**A/N: So it has been years...lots of them...since I was immersed in the world of X-Files fanfic. For the most part, I haven't been reading it, and I had **_**never **_**written any. But I re-watched the Pilot last night for the first time in forever. And I fell in love all over again.**

**I'm sure that this concept has been written about a hundred times, and I have no illusions that I am the first person to smut up the Pilot. But I do hope that my fellow X-fans will indulge me in this "missing scene" that I wrote in loving homage to my very first 'ship.**

**I *heart* you, Mulder and Scully.**

--

Scully. Fucking Scully, in her oversized clothes and too-tall shoes that didn't make up for the fact that she was the tiniest person in the Bureau. Scully, with her professor-glasses and her regurgitated beliefs about the laws of physics and the sanctity of scientific thought that was supposed to explain away every file that had ended up in the cabinet of my basement office. I didn't trust her, not as far as my work was concerned, and she sure as hell didn't trust in _my _understanding of what we were here to investigate. But I _did _trust that whatever my truth was, she believed in hers just as strongly. I'm assuming it was a reciprocal feeling that brought her to me that first night. She may have seen me as weird, my ideas as outlandish. But she knew just from those few days of knowing me that I'd be unflinchingly straight with her, unfailingly honest no matter how much of a jackass it made me look like. So she came to my hotel room, shortly after the power went out, eyes wide with panic of the unknown.

The unknown wasn't something that made me panic anymore. Fuck, it barely even made me raise an eyebrow. But when she turned and dropped her robe in front of me, my heart was pounding faster than it had at any point during our investigation. She had managed to surprise me, with her trust in me at this moment. And as I kneeled behind her, the flame from my candle making the skin glow that was not covered by her sensible cotton underwear, her panic at being marked was experienced by me and compounded by the additional surprise I felt at actually giving a damn whether or not she was okay.

Bug bites, thank God. Bug bites, and she was relieved and flushed in the candlelight and again, literally fucking glowing as she covered herself and turned and pushed her way into my arms. It had been only my fingertips that had been tingling from their touch against the silk skin of her back, and now it was my whole body while she pressed against me that was lighting up like a four alarm blaze, kept flaming by the scent of rain in her wavy hair. "Are you okay?"

She backed out of our embrace self-consciously, eyes not meeting mine. Those eyes were navy in the dim, flickering light. "Yeah, I am." But she was shaking. "I'm sorry. This…isn't like me. Must be lack of sleep. I'm getting paranoid."

I regarded her evenly. "You're apologizing to _me _for being paranoid?"

Continuing to inch towards the door, she replied. "I'm apologizing for interrupting you so late for something ridiculous." The scientist in her was obviously humiliated.

Almost instinctively, my hand reached out and grabbed hers. "The benefit to working with Spooky Mulder is that you never have to feel like the ridiculous one again."

For the first time, I saw a hint of mirth in the eyes that had gone from terrified to guarded in her short time in this room. Why the _fuck _was I trying to reassure her? Part of my agenda for this trip was to freak her out so badly that she'd refuse to work with me again.

Her little hand burned into my own. "I don't think you're ridiculous," she said softly. She was looking downwards at our joined fingers, biting one full lip in apparent consideration, and in her tiny, red-headed, sensible-robed glory she was more tempting than _any _of the women who I had fantasized about while on the phone late at night, stroking myself into a frenzy.

This could well be a set-up. She could have been sent not just to debunk my work, but also to distract me from it with soft skin and big blue eyes and the hint of what treasures existed underneath that simple cotton underwear.

I didn't care.

A tug brought her closer. She didn't resist, and in her slippered feet she had to tilt her head far back to look at me. "This isn't what I came here for," she told me, with an edge of desperation to her voice that made me think that if the set-up scenario was the truth, she was the best damn actress I had _ever _come across.

"I know," I told her a little hoarsely. "Me neither." It was the understatement of the year. I had brought her here to get rid of her, and instead I was quite literally pulling her closer.

The acknowledgement that neither of us knew what the hell we were doing, ironically, made us bolder. My head dipped down. Her toes raised. There was a moment of pausing, a hair's breadth from one another's mouth. This was the time for sense to return to both of us. Well, that time had come and gone several minutes ago. But this was the last chance to pull back from that edge of reason. Either fortunately or not, reason had never meant very much to me.

I caught one of her trembling, pink lips between my own. There. I had just saved us potential weeks or months or maybe even years of dancing around this, just by kissing her now. And if I had thought she was going to continue to be shy, I was sorely mistaken. She kissed me back with ferocity, her fingers tangling in my already-messy hair, her tongue running boldly across my own. In her moment of vulnerability, I had almost forgotten about the fact that timid women didn't get jobs in the FBI. Cursing into her mouth, I lifted her, reaching under her thighs, pulling her into me while I carried her to the bed. She wrapped her legs around my waist, not allowing our lips to separate. I couldn't tell if she were kissing me with passion, or hostility.

When I dropped her onto the sheets, not hard enough to be a throw, but not gently, either, I realized the exact fineness of the line between passion and hostility. I wanted her, was angry at her, respected her, distrusted her, felt the urge to kiss her and fuck her and yell at her all at the same time. Choosing the former (at least for now), I took the liberty this time of being the one to untie that red robe, spreading it wide, taking the luxury of letting my eyes roam over what they had uncovered. She grasped for me, but I was transfixed for a moment.

"What?" she demanded, breathily and a little annoyed at not keeping the pace she had set.

Nothing, Agent Scully. Except I have apparently discovered another X-file. The case of how you can be so fucking sexy and beautiful wearing cheap white lingerie that you probably bought at Sears. Sexier than any woman I've ever seen.

I wasn't going to solve that particular mystery right now and my reaction to her frustrated me, so I only grunted in response to the question and made my arms useful in flipping her over on the bed. I relished in her small sound of surprise at being moved this way, and her easy relenting to my yanking away of her robe. Tossing it aside, I kneeled over the backs of her thighs. The touch of my tongue to the base of her spine made her gasp and arch. Aside from the tiny red bites that had brought her to me tonight, her skin was creamy and smooth and tasted like the rain. Her breath came in pants while I ran my tongue slowly up the middle of her back, eventually reaching the clasp of her bra.

"Take it off," she whispered, as if I would have been convinced to do anything else. I flipped open the hooks easily, pressing the straps over her shoulders and arms without stilling the journey of my tongue. Reaching the place where her hair spilled over her shoulder, I detoured over the other one, licking up and over her throat while she lifted up onto her hands to pull of the bra. I took advantage of her position, sliding one hand underneath her and cupping her breast, trapping the tip of it between my squeezing fingers. The sound that left her sounded suspiciously like a sob, and I had no doubt that by now she could feel my erection pressing against her ass. Hell, maybe she had felt it when it had first appeared, when she had thrown her little body into my arms in relief earlier. The thought made me feel just a little guilty before she moaned again, and I rolled her nipple again with my fingertips.

She flipped around then onto her back, unexpectedly, and the sight of her bare-breasted near knocked the wind out of me. She was too far gone to let me stare this time, and she pulled my head to her chest. Seemingly confused by what exactly she wanted, she was trying to wrestle me out of the shirts I was wearing while at the same time encouraging me to lave at her, but I went along the best I could, sharing her desire to have skin-on-skin, to finally be in a position where I could kiss and touch her at the same time, without barriers. One of her adventurous hands found its way down my pants, and I jerked and swore again, seeming to manage very little coherence in her presence. Her nimble fingers were persistent. I was weak.

"Scully," I gasped. Not sure whether to press into her hand and risk embarrassing myself, or to pull away and get relief against the aching pleasure, I tried to make her understand as best I could without being fully able to speak.

She gripped harder.

"_Scully," _I breathed, desperately. This was it. Our potential for a decent partnership and for great sex, both about to blow up in my face (or my pants, more accurately). It would have been laughable if it wouldn't have been so, pathetically typical of my life.

I was about to say her name again, now in more of a warning than a plea, when suddenly she jerked away from me like she had been stung. Disoriented, reeling, I blinked at her uncomprehendingly.

"The phone, Mulder." Her eyes were wide, her whole body flushed, but she was right. Despite the fact that nothing else electrical appeared to function in this damn town, the phone was ringing. I grabbed at it, while she grabbed at her robe.

"Hello? _What?"_

When I hung up…after being hung up _on…_I wondered if she could see relief or regret in my eyes, because damn if I knew which one I was feeling. "Peggy O'Dell is dead," I told her.

She looked at me, surprised, but understanding. The case…the work…trumped anything that was happening between her and me.

Again, sadly, pathetically typical of my life.

--

The car ride to the scene of the accident…was it an accident?...was quiet. I knew she'd want to resolve things…she liked things tied up nicely and neatly…and I dreaded her attempts to do so.

"Mulder. About tonight…"

"Don't worry about it," I told her abruptly, and more harshly than I intended.

She winced, and glowered. "Great," she murmured, looking out the window, apparently responding to the meaning she perceived to be behind my cold attitude.

For the first time, it bothered me to be misread by her, because I _knew _she wasn't right about what I was thinking. "I'm not upset that I almost slept with you," I told her, again annoyed at my own need to reassure her.

She looked back at me guardedly.

"I'm upset that I might actually like you."

Her eyebrows raised, and she studied me carefully, appearing pacified, if not surprised. "You don't have like me. Just trust me."

"One's as bad as the other," I said morosely, just beginning to see the flashing police lights in the distance.

It was her voice this time that took on a tone of harshness. "Toughen up, Mulder," she said. "Whether you like it or not, you aren't in this alone anymore."

As we pulled up to the chaos that I had always been a part of, and she had just been pulled into, I had no way of knowing of whether or not "not alone" could be anything other than disastrous for a person like me.

But somehow, I was more anxious than ever to find out.


End file.
